Job 33:8-12, “Surely you have spoken in my hearing, and I have heard the sound of your words, saying, ‘I am pure, without transgression; I am innocent, and there is no iniquity in me. Yet He finds occasions against me, He counts me as His enemy; He puts my feet in the stocks, He watches all my paths.’ Look, in this you are not righteous. I will answer you, for God is greater than man.”
Though he
believed himself to be the possessor of pure knowledge, one from whose lips
nothing else could flow, Elihu’s first action was to fall into the logic trap Job’s
friends had likewise fallen into, not allowing for the possibility that there
was something beyond what they understood taking place.
I’ve heard you
say you were pure, without transgression, and that there is no iniquity in you,
but if that were the case, why would God find occasion against you? If you were
an innocent man, then God would not count you as His enemy; ergo, you are not
an innocent man!
With all the
build-up, with all the bloviating words Elihu used to introduce himself, one
would think his first address to Job would have contained a tad more wisdom
than it did. After talking himself up to the point of appointing himself as
Job’s spokesman before God, his hot take was basic and banal. There is nothing
new. There is no epiphany, no nugget of wisdom that would make one believe
Elihu was as profound and intellectually gifted as he thought himself to be,
but that’s the thing about hubris: it always makes the individual suffering
from it think more highly of himself than he has any right to.
One thing Elihu
said was true: God is greater than man, but given the subtext of his words, he
also concluded that even though God is greater than man, God must see Job’s
situation as he did, thereby making God beholden to him in His thinking.
I have judged you
guilty; therefore, God will judge you guilty as well. It matters not that you
insist upon your innocence or that there is no evidence of sin or wrongdoing; I
am Elihu, and I have judged you thusly.
Presumptive human
reasoning based on one’s own prejudices and the mind of God don’t mix. To
assume that the two are in harmony, and appropriate the authority of God in
one’s assertions isn’t merely dangerous; it’s sinful. God will not share His
glory with another, nor will He allow His authority to be misappropriated and
abused.
When one comes in
the name of the Lord, they are there to speak His words, do His bidding,
deliver His message, and nothing more. He must have been sent by the Lord in
order to come in His name, and everything he does in his duty toward the Lord
must be within the boundaries of what the Lord declared. You neither have the
authority to wing it nor interpret the words that God spoke and assume that it’s
what God meant. Your duty is to repeat the words God spoke verbatim, meaning in
exactly the same words as were used originally.
Elihu had not
been sent; he had no message; he had no word from the Lord for Job, yet he
presumed to know the mind of God and placed himself as the sole mediator
between Job and God.
Job 33:13-18,
“Why do you contend with Him? For He does not give an accounting of any of His
words. For God may speak in one way, or in another, yet man does not perceive
it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, while
slumbering on their beds, then He opens the ears of men, and seals their
instruction. In order to turn man from his deed, and conceal pride from man, He
keeps back his soul from the Pit, and his life from perishing by the sword.”
As I read Elihu’s
words, the one analogy that comes to mind is of someone trying to teach a fully
grown, adult Shakespeare the alphabet, insisting that he needs to know the
basics of language before he can hope to read a sentence, never mind write one.
Job was a man who was so accustomed to the presence of God that his singular
terror was His absence, yet Elihu was going on about the varied ways He can
speak to mankind, yet mankind, being obtuse, does not perceive His message.
Job’s greatest
lament was God’s silence. Not that God had spoken and he’d missed it, or that
he did not understand the message he’d received in a dream or a vision of the
night, but cry out as he might, God remained silent to him.
Job had made this
clear enough in his discourse, but Elihu heard what he wanted to hear, and had
formulated his conclusions based on the premise that God was punishing Job for
something he had yet to admit to, and what’s worse, in Elihu’s estimation, God
had been speaking to Job all this time, but Job was too dense to perceive it.
He hasn’t gone
quite so far yet, but at some point it would be no surprise if Elihu went with
the standard, “If I were in your shoes, this issue would have been resolved a
long time ago. I would have perceived what God was telling me and would have
acted accordingly, but you refuse to do so. God has tried to turn you from your
deeds, but you did not turn.”
It’s evident that
although Elihu thought pure knowledge flowed from his lips, he had no clue what
he was talking about regarding Job and his relationship with God. He judged the
situation for what it was without spiritual insight or allowing for the
possibility that something more was happening, just as Job’s friends had done.
We’ve all been guilty of getting caught up in thinking we were right about something to the point that it becomes all important to prove just how right we were. When it turns out we weren’t, that we’d misjudged a situation or a person, one of the hardest things is to admit as much, to acknowledge that we’d judged wrongly, and that we need to repent of it.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
Posted on 7 June 2026 | 11:24 am
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